


song for a sharpshooter

by RecklessDaydreamer



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Gen, Gun Violence, w359bb17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 05:40:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13160445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecklessDaydreamer/pseuds/RecklessDaydreamer
Summary: Five guns Maxwell fired, plus one she didn’t. (or, the story of Dr. Alana Maxwell and her mad rifling skills.)[This fic contains gun violence.]





	song for a sharpshooter

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of the 2017 Wolf 359 Big Bang (winter edition).  
> Also! Erstach made art for this! http://bit.ly/2labTVr
> 
> The gun violence warning applies to parts 4 and +1.

_one_.

Alana Maxwell first fires a gun on a clear April morning, the day after her eighth birthday. The rifle is heavy in her hands, the bolt so rusted it takes all her strength to close, and when she pulls the trigger the kick makes her jump even though she’s lying flat. The bottle sits on the fencepost, taunting her.

Adam shrugs. “Try again.” He’s sixteen, nearly out of school, one of the best on the rifle team. Alana looks up to her older brother maybe more than anybody.

She puts the rifle down carefully— _don’t ever point it at a person_ — and, bracing the stock with one hand, muscles the bolt open. The brass casing pops out of the breach, and she jams the bolt closed again.

“Put the butt in your shoulder,” Adam says, and adjusts the rifle so it’s tucked up by her collarbone. “Lean on your elbows.” She does. “Pick your target. Pin in the vee.” She rests her cheek on the stock and finds the bottle on the fence, then puts the pin of the sight on the bottle and the vee-shaped notch on the pin. “Put your finger on the trigger and squeeze it _slowly_.” Alana does, holding her breath so her body doesn’t move at all, and she feels it when the trigger clicks down and the gun fires.

On the fencepost, the bottle shatters, green glass flying in every direction. Adam whacks her shoulder. “Nice shot, ‘Lanie.”

Alana says, “Can I shoot another?”

Adam has five more empty bottles, and they drink the two cans of root beer he brought so she can shoot those too, and then Adam draws bulls-eyes on torn pages of Alana’s notebook and tacks them to fenceposts. She misses a lot, but she hits some, too, and by the time they have to go home for lunch she’s got six broken bottles, two shot cans, and a sheet of lined paper with a bullet hole right in the middle. They walk a mile home across the foothills.

“I’m going to win the shooting contest,” Alana declares. “At the fair.”

“You’re gonna beat me?” Adam teases. He has to look down at her, shading his eyes with one hand. “I’ll buy you a Coke if you ever do.”

“That’ll be a lot of Coke,” Alana says, and Adam laughs.

 

It’s a small town, Philipsburg, and people talk. They talk when Alana joins the rifling team at Philipsburg Parochial, and they talk when she wins first place three years running. _Sure, she’s a preacher’s kid, but that PK can shoot_.

What makes the most gossip in Philipsburg, though, is the day Alana Maxwell, sixteen years old, packs a bag and leaves for Massachusetts without a word of warning. She leaves the morning of the county fair.

 

 

 _two_.

The range is loud with everyone packed in. The MIT Riflery Invitational is a big event in the right circles, and Alana’s considering getting earplugs after all, just to block out the noise.

She fidgets with the zipper of her red uniform jacket. This is her third year on the team, she’s ranked first in the conference, but she still gets nervous. Especially now, with the highest score MIT’s ever shot in her sights. She made 196 points prone and 194 kneeling, which means 190 standing, minimum, if she wants to break 580.

Three positions. Twenty shots per round. Of six hundred possible points, 580 is a sharpshooter’s dream.

“Three-by-twenty, standing,” the announcer calls.

She’s got her gun over one shoulder, a handful of clips in her pocket, a paper number pinned to her back. Alana takes the last spot on the firing line. She recognizes most of the other shooters but can’t put names to faces. Happens with niche sports. You know people without knowing them, which is how she likes it, really.

“The range is live,” the announcer says. Alana turns her gun in her hand and loads a clip. The fluorescent lighting glints on the stock.

“Take your positions on the range.” She plants her feet, kitty-corner to the line, and things get very quiet all of a sudden. Adrenaline is slower than a bullet but not by much.

“Load and lock one round,” the announcer says, and she thumbs the safety off. “Fire at will.”

The rifle is an Anschutz, semi-auto, with a vee-notch sight Alana built herself. She raises it to her shoulder without a second thought. Pin on the target. Vee on the pin. Trigger slow.

Alana doesn’t look at the target— bad luck when she’s this sure— just takes the rest of the shots. The lights flicker and hum; she grits her teeth and stares down the range.

Then the count in her head goes _eighteen, nineteen, twenty_ and she ejects the clip before she realizes. The round is over. Alana stands back from the line, gun held loosely in both hands, and waits for the rest of the shooters to finish. When the last of them lowers his rifle and steps back, the announcer calls, “The range is clear. Please retrieve your targets for judging.”

Alana crosses the range and unpins the bullseye. She can’t keep herself from scrutinizing it. There’s a lot of shots in the ten-ring— she runs the numbers as quickly as she can— five hundred _eighty-five_ , she shot enough!

She turns back to walk back and it’s like surfacing from a deep dive. She knows she’s grinning like a Cheshire cat. Dasha calls, “Hey, Maxwell, what’d you get?” and Elliot shouts, “She did it!” and Jack’s whooping something incoherent— Alana can’t help it, she laughs.

They go out for ice cream after the competition ends, Alana with a paper rosette pinned to her jacket. It’s on crooked thanks to Jack, a little crushed since Dasha hugged her. The cashier at the Ben & Jerry’s across the Charles River asks what the occasion is, and Jack spills the entire five-eighty-five saga. It’s incoherent to anyone but the MIT rifling squad, but they’re dressed in red and silver, so they get a free coupon anyway. Elliot buys two quarts of Cherry Garcia with the team funds, and they pass spoons around on the bank of the Charles.

Alana blows off her homework because wild horses couldn’t drag her into the library now. She still feels like she could balance the world on a vee-notch sight. It’s October and the night is half-dark, half-brilliant and Alana, running through it, doesn’t think she’ll ever go to sleep again.

 

 

 _three_.

Maxwell— _Doctor_ Alana Maxwell— meets Daniel Jacobi a week after accepting Kepler’s offer of employment. He looks her up and down before sticking out his hand to shake, and she does the same. He’s taller than her, scruffy, and burn scars warp the skin on his arms. After greeting her at Kepler’s expectant glance, he doesn’t speak to her for a week.

Then, one evening, Jacobi barges into her lab with a smoking grenade in his hands, yelling for needle-nose pliers. She grabs them from her corkboard and runs for the fire extinguisher in the hall. By the time she gets back, he’s got the grenade cracked open and its parts scattered across her desk. The jaws of the pliers have been melted flat.

“What can I do?” she asks.

Jacobi doesn’t answer for a second. Then he says, “Copper wire. Got any?”

“Sure.” She grabs it down from the corkboard. Maxwell’s good enough with hardware, but this— this is something that’s _supposed_ to explode, not just maybe by accident.

“Hold this open?” Jacobi asks, and she does, prying the casing apart as he leans in with a soldering iron he must’ve pulled out of his pants, because Maxwell sure doesn’t have one. The smoke alarm is going off, but Jacobi just keeps working like he does this every day.

Finally he straightens up with a groan. “Ah, fuck.”

“What was _that_?” Maxwell demands.

“Problem with the detonator,” he says. “I— thanks.”

She eyes him. “You’re welcome.”

Jacobi gathers up his grenade and heads for the door. He stops short, though, and turns back around. “Okay. Fine. Why did Kepler hire you, anyway?”

Maxwell raises an eyebrow. “I’m an AI expert. Just the best in my field, that’s all.”

Jacobi shakes his head. “What else do you do?”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s not useful in a fight.” Over Maxwell’s protests, Jacobi continues, “Kepler wouldn’t hire someone who’d be deadweight in a bad situation. I’m ballistics. He likes handguns. So what else do you do?”

“I’m a sharpshooter.” Kepler didn’t say anything about combat, but like hell she’s going to let this jackass talk down to her.

Jacobi looks at her sideways, and Maxwell isn’t sure if that look means _you’re a girl_ or _anyone can point and shoot_ , but she won’t stand for it either way. She turns on her heel and goes to the big back cabinet. The hard case is where it always is, double-locked on the highest shelf, and she lays it on the floor and flips open the latches. Two rifles are nestled inside, her Anschutz tucked next to an old bolt-action with a scarred stock. Maxwell slings the bolt-action over her shoulder. She digs through the closet drawers and retrieves a box of five-bullet clips and a mesh bag packed with clays. “C’mon.”

“Where… are we going?”

Maxwell doesn’t deign to answer.

Goddard has a shooting range, of course. It’s close to Special Intelligence, in the fitness complex. But Maxwell goes in the opposite direction, to the parkland at the edge of the Goddard campus. It’s Friday evening, getting dark. Crickets are chirping in the tall grass. Maxwell climbs a hill that overlooks a small pond, Jacobi jogging in her wake. At the top, she hands him the bag of clays and sits.  

She loads the rifle and thumbs off the safety as Jacobi sits down beside her. He opens the bag of clays and pulls one out: a palm-sized disk, painted orange. Designed to shatter when shot. “You want me to go put these somewhere?” he asks, just this side of too polite.

Maxwell shakes her head, raising the gun to her shoulder and bracing her elbows on her knees. “Throw it.”

“What?”

“Throw it.”

Jacobi winds up and throws the clay. It arcs up against the purple-gray sky, then starts to fall, tumbling in slow motion. Maxwell breathes halfway out, swings the barrel, squeezes the trigger. The clay shatters.

Jacobi blinks at her.

Maxwell jams the heel of her hand against the bolt. The breach opens, and a bullet casing tumbles out. She closes the bolt and hears the next bullet click into the chamber. “Throw another,” she says, and Jacobi hurls a clay into the evening air. She hits it. Cycles the bolt, loads the third bullet.

“Another.” One clay on its parabolic pathway plus one bullet flying straighter than Maxwell. Find the intersection. Fire.

“Another.” Most people shoot clays with a shotgun, a spray of shot. It’s supposed to be nearly impossible to hit a flying target with a single bullet. But Maxwell has always thought “impossible” was an awfully sad word.

“Another.” Jacobi throws it in a high arc this time. Maxwell twitches the gun up, and the clay shatters. She ejects the clip and loads the next, then gets to her feet, and Jacobi stands to throw the next set of clays. Maxwell hits them, of course, in swift silence.

Jacobi starts changing his throws. One high, the next low, the third far left. He flips a clay casually over his shoulder, and Maxwell spins and shoots it without missing a beat. Throw, trigger, shatter, cycle the bolt and fire again. The _crack, crack, crack_ of gunfire fills the air. It’s getting dark, but the orange paint still flashes enough for Maxwell to aim. She’s caught between joyful and vengeful. Calculated violence.

After shooting eight clips, she lowers the rifle and rolls her neck, making a satisfyingly loud pop. The bag of clays is almost empty. Jacobi’s thrown forty and she hasn’t missed one.

“How’d you do that?” Jacobi asks, sounding incredulous.

“Like I said,” Maxwell says, “I’m a sharpshooter.”

After a moment, he says, “Nice to meet another specialist.”

“Oh, I’m not a specialist. This is just what I do on the weekends.”

Jacobi laughs. “Hey. Got another clip?”

She pats her pockets and pulls it out. “One more.”

Jacobi holds up the grenade and raises his eyebrows. It sort of looks like he only tried to raise one.

“What, shooting it? That only works in action movies,” Maxwell says. “The Mythbusters proved it.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

Jacobi groans. “Damn.”

“Do you not watch Mythbusters?”

“Explosions aren’t big enough.”

“I’m sorry, did you miss the frequent use of C4?”

“You can always use more C4.”

Jacobi fixes smoking bombs. Maxwell shoots with near perfect precision. They walk back down the hill, bickering all the way.

 

 

 _four_.

Maxwell walked into her lab one day to find a sleek black rifle lying across her desk.

She approached the gun like she’d walk up to a shying horse. The breach was open, and the safety was on, and as soon as she’d checked that she swept it off the desk and lifted it to her shoulder. It was light, but solid somehow. The stock tucked into her shoulder like it was made for her. Felt like she could balance it on a fingertip.

This gun, Maxwell thought, was probably the best she’d ever held.

A quick look at the breach said it was semiauto. Probably held forty bullets a clip. There was no logo on the barrel or stock. So it was Goddard, but not public. This was a Strategic Intelligence gun.

Maxwell ran her fingers along the barrel. She smiled.

Kepler found her at the firing range with her clay thrower at her side. It had taken her a couple shots to get used to the gun and its ridiculously perfect balance, but it was the same feeling as ever. Controlled demolition. Kepler asked her how she liked the gun and told her to bring it along on their next… outing.

Maxwell kind of regrets that now.

She’s camped out in a snow-filled crow’s nest on the wall of a chemical weaponry lab, one of Goddard’s competitors, and Jacobi and Kepler are on the ground but she’s stuck up here with a laptop and a gun. Both of those can save them up until the lab’s security detail gets involved, at which point only one of those is going to save them, and it’s definitely not the laptop.

That’s the crux of it.

Point and pull and save a life, end a life, but once she fires there’s going to be more guards— _thou shalt not kill_ , says the little back part of her brain, and she smacks it down.

Focus. Precision.

The wind is cold up here, blowing snow into her face, but her laptop is feverishly hot when she drags it onto her lap. She scrolls through the lab’s security protocols until she finds the heat sensing system. A click, and a glowing map of the compound opens on her screen. Kepler and Jacobi’s red figures, running toward the western wing, pursued by a quartet of guards. What’s next? Doors. Back to the main security menu, and— shit, no, they’ve blocked her out again.

Maxwell cracks her knuckles and dives back in.

Her earpiece crackles, and Jacobi hisses, “Maxwell, come in.”

“I’m here. What’s up?”

“Almost to the west wing. Four behind us.”

“Armed?”

“No, they’re bringing us fruit baskets and Époisse. Of course they’re fucking armed!” He closes the channel before she has time to tell him that French cheeses qualify as weaponry.

Maxwell turns back to her laptop and tabs over to the heat map. Kepler and Jacobi are in a back corridor of the west wing, moving fast.

She opens the channel again. “Can you get to a room with a window?”

“Sure,” Jacobi pants.

“Buzz me when you’re in.”

The red figures turn down the main corridor, then sideways, stopping at each door. The locks are holding. Maxwell turns back to her laptop. Where’s the containment procedure? There— she opens the menu, finds the room codes for the second floor of the west wing, and cancels them all.

On the map, Kepler and Jacobi leave the corridor and enter a side room. Jacobi hangs back, presumably shooting the lock so it seizes up, and Kepler crosses to the window. The guards turn down the main corridor.

Maxwell’s earpiece buzzes. She tells Jacobi, “Break the window.”

There’s a rattle of gunfire, and Maxwell freezes. Shit. She didn’t see it before, since the heat map only covers the building itself, but there’s a trio of guards plowing through the snow along the side of the west wing, headed for Kepler and Jacobi’s window.

“No, wait,” she says, “guards—”

“You don’t say,” Jacobi deadpans, but his voice is a little too tight to pull it off.

Maxwell peers through the scope again. They’re lightly armored, just tactical vests.

“Can you retreat?”

“Locked the door but they’re shooting it.”

“Through the wall?”

“It’s fortified—”

Kepler interrupts him. First time he’s said anything so far. “You’ll need to clear our escape, Maxwell. Ten seconds.” He closes the channel.

Maxwell grabs her gun and flicks off the safety before she has time to think. (Nine.) The squad of guards is under the window. (Eight.) Adrenaline throbs in her veins and the world narrows to the crosshairs. (Seven.) It’s critical mission failure if she doesn’t do this. (Six.) The range is live (five) partners or innocents (four) the door is buckling (three) she can’t (two) she has to—

Maxwell fires.

One of the guards crumples into the snow, and the others are down before they can figure out where the bullets are coming from, and then Kepler and Jacobi are smashing through the window and jumping out into the howling night. They struggle through the snow and run toward the gate below Maxwell’s crow’s nest, guns out. The squad on the second floor kicks the door down. Maxwell brings her barrel up, aims, gets two shots through the window before the rest of the squad ducks. Below her, Kepler and Jacobi are leaping into the hulk of an ATV and Jacobi is throwing grenades behind them, leaving splashes of light as Kepler revs the engine.

Maxwell sets her laptop and phone to self-destruct, slings her gun over her shoulder, and climbs down the back side of the crow’s nest. She jumps down the last ten feet and dashes to the ATV, every step punching through the crusted snow. The engine growls, slicked up with oil that smells headier than champagne.

“Pursuit?” Kepler asks.

“None,” Maxwell says.

“Good work.”

Jacobi gives her a fist bump as she climbs on the back of the ATV, and then Kepler hits the gas and they go charging off with a roar and a sackful of corporate secrets.

Maxwell’s gun is warm on her back and she doesn’t really mind.

 

 

 _five_.

It takes a few weeks to get from Earth to the Hephaestus. Good thing, too. She didn’t get time to review any of the documentation on the station’s mother program before they left, what with trying to prep for the biggest language-mapping epic-code-writing stick-it-to-them stunt of her entire life. And as the two-time winner of the Babbage Institute Code-Off, that’s saying a lot.

But anyway. The mother program is… really something. Named “Hera”, apparently. Fitting for a station called the Hephaestus.

“Hey, Maxwell.”

That crash report is pretty disconcerting. Overrides and system failures left and right.

“Maxwell.”

Looks like there’s been a major reconstruction of the personality core, too.

“ _Maxwell_!”

A glob of water smacks her in the side of her head. No artificial gravity on the Urania, so it’s just a wet bubble that spreads into her hair. Maxwell drops her tablet, flailing at the wibbling water-jelly. “Jacobi!”

He’s grinning like he’s holding a case of Greek fire instead of two water guns. “C’mon, Maxwell, have some fun. We still have two weeks!”

“So I need to _prepare_ —”

“No, you need a water gun.” Jacobi flicks it toward her, and it drifts awkwardly until Maxwell snatches it out of the air. It’s bright green, with _Super Soaker_ emblazoned along the bubbled plastic barrel.

“How’d you even load this?”

“Pressurized water canisters,” Jacobi says, and reaches toward her, presumably to demonstrate.

Maxwell flips the gun in her hand, finds the trigger, and shoots him in the chest. It’s not paintball, but the look of betrayal on Jacobi’s face is still satisfying. He attempts a return shot, and Maxwell dodges easily. “You can do better than that.”

Jacobi chases her out of the room and down the hall as she shoots over her shoulder, sending thin streams of water floating toward him. Maxwell flees into the kitchen, ducking behind the bulkhead and popping out to fire as Jacobi passes. He catches himself and turns, but she’s already kicked off in the opposite direction. “Catch me if you can!” she whoops, and looks back just in time to crash into Kepler as he emerges from his cabin.

“Dr. Maxwell?” he says. “What, exactly, are you doing?”

Jacobi stops himself with a hand on the ceiling and proceeds more slowly. “Just some situational target practice, sir.”

“I see,” Kepler says.

Maxwell points her water gun backward and pulls the trigger blind. Jacobi yelps, and she smiles sweetly at Kepler as she kicks off and soars down the hall, turning somersaults to aim a few more shots. Better than paintball.

They have two weeks until they dock with the Hephaestus. Might as well use them.

 

 

 _\+ one_.

It comes down to this:

The Hephaestus crew has been planning for weeks. It’s adorable, really. And they tried to split up the SI-5. They get brownie points for that, is what Jacobi said when they were planning tactics.

It was working perfectly, too, until contingency Echo kicked in, and then Hera double-crossed her, and then someone was standing behind her with a fire extinguisher—

It comes down to this:

Maxwell’s tied to a chair and Minkowski has a gun in her hand but she’s still pretty sure things are going to work out. They always do.

Jacobi calls Minkowski on the napalm—her face is just _hilarious_ , did she really think they didn’t know— and of course the lieutenant commander of the Hephaestus has always had one weakness: her crew. This is a certainty. This is a fact as precise and directed as a gunshot.

It comes down to this:

Sixty seconds, and Minkowski’s hands are shaking. The psych evals say she doesn’t have it in her. Maxwell can see it. Maxwell’s looked down the barrel of a gun, seen the face at the other end, and pulled the trigger. Business, dirty work, it’s all the same at Goddard, and in the blue, blue light of Wolf 359, Minkowski looks afraid.

When was the last time Maxwell was afraid?

Thirty seconds, and Maxwell grits her teeth against Minkowski’s defiance. It’s empty. It always is. The SI-5 always win. That’s a fact, too, the safety clicking off, the breach closing on the next bullet.

It comes down to this:

Adrenaline is Maxwell’s favorite feeling. When she’s got gunpowder in her veins she’s never missed a shot. But now Jacobi’s counting down and Minkowski’s not standing down and something’s going down that Maxwell can’t predict— not anymore— because there isn’t a trigger to pull or a bottle to break, no direction for that hard-edged adrenaline.

It comes down to this:

_three,_

_two,_

a cold barrel up against her temple and voices on the PA and a bone-shattering explosion and that weird blueness flooding all around her, everything in different shades of shadow so she can’t tell where to aim, where to fire,

_one_

  


**Author's Note:**

> As it turns out, part 3 got kinda jossed by Brave New World. Whoops. (Fun fact, I actually wrote that scene a year ago and then built the rest of this fic around it for the big bang.)  
> According to the official character page, Maxwell was the star of her school riflery team.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @swallowtailed, come say hi!


End file.
